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BUTLER, WILLIAM J. H. ANOTHER CITY UPON A HILL: LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT, AND THE COLONIAL REVIVAL

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE (WINTERTHUR PROGRAM) M.A. 1983

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University Microfilms International

LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT, AND THE COLONIAL REVIVAL

William J, H. Butler

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Early American Culture

June, 1983

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ANOTHER CITY UPON A HILL:

LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT, AND THE COLONIAL REVIVAL

William J. H. Butler

Approved: n M.______Daraie Stillman, Ph.D. Professor in charge of thesis on behalf of the Advisory Committee

•Approved: Kenneth L. Ames, Ph.D. Professor in charge of thesis on behalf of the Advisory Committee

.Approved: \-€L. ______Stephanie G. Wolf,• Ph.D.- ^ Coordinator of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture

Approved: R. B. Murray, Ph.D. University Coordinator for Graduate Studies

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for all of their

help and suggestions while I prepared this thesis: Locket Ford

Ballard, Edmunds Bunkse, Robert G. Carroon, Elizabeth Connell, Blaine

and Eleanor Cota, the late Benno M. Forman, J. B. Jackson, Neil

Larson, Leo Lemay, Barbara MacDonald, Laurel and Rosalie Ripley,

Jay Sadler, Nancy Soccorso, Barbara Todd, Dell Upton, Mrs. and Mrs.

George Vondermuhll, and William L. Warren.

Special thanks go to Mrs. Ludlow S. Bull and Nan F. Heminway

for their energetic inspiration and assistance.

Finally, I would like to thank Kenneth L. Ames, Damie Stillman,

and Stephanie G. Wolf for their saintly patience and valuable comments

as I wrote this thesis. Without their help I could not have produced

this work.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowlegderaents ...... iii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1. All Roads Lead to Litchfield: The New England

Town in American Ideology ...... 3

Chapter 2. From Pioneer Wilderness to Polite World: The

Colonial Landscape of Litchfield ...... 11

Chapter 3. From Colonial Urban Village to Victorian

Country Town ...... 24

Chapter 4. Creating the Ideal Colonial Image ...... 28

Chapter 5. The Shaping of Public Sentiment ...... 43

Conclusion: The Survival of the Revival ...... 51

Footnotes ...... 52

Bibliography ...... 58

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION

This paper analyzes the changing image of the New England

village and how it became a national symbol during the Colonial

Revival. Litchfield, Connecticut (Figure 1), a stereotypical town

that popular sentiment perceives as a realistic representation of

an eighteenth-century colonial village, is in fact an idealized

interpretation of what elite society during the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries thought was colonial.'*'

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2

Figure 1. Village Green, Litchfield, Connecticut. March 1982. (Author).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1

ALL ROADS LEAD TO LITCHFIELD:

THE NEW ENGLAND TOWN IN AMERICAN IDEOLOGY

A typical New England town in the modern landscape is a

nucleated village of white clapboard houses lining elm-shaded streets,

with a simple Congregational church, a general store, and a small

schoolhouse surrounding a park-like green. We perceive this classic

setting as a monument to colonial America, a monument unchanged

since the eighteenth century. We assume that Puritans, in search

of religious freedom, founded this typical settlement in the midst

of a hostile wilderness. Small-town boys grew up here, fought for

our nation's independence, and then became famous statesmen. This

village is steeped in Yankee tradition and conservatism: it is the

home of town-meeting democracy and the "American experience." Most

of the inhabitants are genteel farmers living in houses built by

their Revolutionary ancestors. George Washington must have slept

here.

But the New England town has not always evoked such stereo

types and has undergone significant alterations since the earliest

English settlements. Even contemporary geographers and architectural

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historians have perpetuated the stereotype of the New England town,

basing their conclusions on romanticized tradition, misconceptions,

and erroneous town histories. The geographer John Brinckerhoff

Jackson is perhaps the first scholar to raise questions about the

accuracy of popular as well as scholarly images of the archetypal

New England town. In "Several American Landscapes" Jackson alerts

his readers that

no landscape has ever changed so profoundly and so swiftly as ours; not merely within the recent past but from its very beginning. So completely did the Colonial landscape vanish during the nineteenth century that aside from a few monuments nothing remains of it.

Despite doubts such as these, scholars have never sufficiently

analyzed the rethinking and--more importantly--the reshaping of the 2 New England town during the Colonial Revival. An understanding of

these processes of transformation requires an accurate documentation

of the colonial, or pre-Revolutionary, landscape as well as a brief

history of the New England village and its changing role in American

ideology.

Boston, the first community in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,

was intended to be a compact agricultural village planned around a

meetinghouse and governed by a Christian Covenant that promoted

unity and equality. This fabled "city upon a hill," like similar

Puritan settlements, however, began to break down after its first

generation of establishment. By the mid seventeenth century most

New Englanders did not live in compact villages, but rather on

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3 dispersed farmsteads. Those who did live within the boundaries of

a town built town or village centers that contained nothing more than

a meetinghouse, a school, a tavern, and a few houses.

The nucleated village did not emerge in New England until

after the Revolution, when our nation experienced commercial, trans- 4 portation, and general economic expansion. The hill villages of

northwestern Connecticut and Massachusetts particularly enjoyed a

"Golden Age" between 1780 and 1830; several became modern urban

villages, prospering with stylish architecture, new indurtry, and

increased business.

Duing the next generation, however, many New England hill

villages suffered from a steady decline in manufacturing, commerce,

and population. Their difficult mountainous geography prevented the

establishment of a railroad network, thereby cutting off substantial

trade. Agriculture, in turn, diminished as farmers either relocated

on more productive land in the West or moved to large cities for

factory work. This change especially altered the colonial character

of the New England landscape as river and coastal towns, with more

powerful water sources, gradually became industrial cities, while

once-prosperous hill villages gracefully aged as fashionable Victorian

summer resorts.

Wealthy city folk were largely responsible for transforming

colonial urban villages, essentially barren of natural vegetation,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. into "picturesque" or countrified towns. They formed Village Improve

ment Societies, which decorated streets with towering shade trees and

inviting parks. These summer residents broke away from classical

tradition to build stylish gothic and Italianate cottages that better

harmonized with the natural colors of the landscape. Beautification

and architectural changes in resorts such as Stockbridge, Massachusetts,

or Litchfield, Connecticut, in no way re-created America's historical

past. Most of elite society during the mid nineteenth century were

modernists, too preoccupied with the progress of the present to think

about the past.15 Our nation had written histories, celebrated

patriotic anniversaries, and formed historical repositories, but

because our nation was so new, we interpreted our heritage as an

index of how far we had come, not as what we should revert back to.

By the 1860s, however, Americans were becoming increasingly

bewildered by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and

immigration. Society became increasingly stratified culturally,

economically, and politically, at last fighting a Civil War.

Disillusionment with the war, discontentment with Reconstruction,

and a severe financial panic in 1873 prompted Americans to reminisce

about what seemed a more stable and less complicated past. The

Centennial celebration of 1876 extolled the advancement of modern

machinery while at the same time it encouraged Americans to appreciate

their national heritage. Writing in 1877, the architect Robert Swain

Peabody observed that with the Centennial we "discovered that we too

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have a past worthy of study .... Our Colonial work is our only

native source of antiquarian study and inspiration."^ A new h i s t o r i c a l

consciousness had indeed been discovered as a better source of

inspiration for the present and the future. A Colonial Revival

resulted.

Architecture was the most effective material manifestation

of the Colonial Revival. As an early chronicler of the movement

wrote, "Architecture is crystallized history . . . it represent[s] 7 the life of the past in visible and enduring form." New England-

style architecture tended to dominate taste during most of the

Colonial Revival. Just as New England monopolized biased American

histories, so too did it monopolize architecture. Architects t h o u g h t

that New England buildings were the oldest American buildings and

therefore the most truly American. The prevailing taste for c o l o n i a l

New England, furthermore, represented Northern supremacy to a s o c i e t y

recently recovering from a war between its states.

William B. Rhoads has pointed out that patriotic sentiment

was one of the appealing forces behind colonial-style architecture.

Native Americans restored historic buildings and built modern C o l o n i a l g Revival structures as a sign of nationalism. In addition, these

structures could function as symbols of ancestry and social s t a t u s .

Immigrants, living in cities, could at least identify themselves w i t h

Colonial Revival buildings because the immigrant was himself a " m o d e r n

colonial" in the American landscape.

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During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the

intensification of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration

threatened the identity of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Individual

colonial or Colonial Revival buildings standing alone did not satisfy

/ the ideological needs of elite WASP society, which began to search

for a comprehensive colonial environment. It sought refuge in the

venerable New England town. Here history prevaded; one found a higher

concentration of colonial structures as well as inhabitants of

"superior native stock." The wealthy upper class could easily escape

the poverty, filth, and overcrowding in cities to summer in the

Arcadian hills of New England. Elites further transformed the urban

village (become Victorian resort) into an emblem of what they thought

best symbolized colonialism: stability, morality, and democracy. In

many popular novels, writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe--born and

raised in Litchfield--romanticized life in New England towns at the 9 turn of the nineteenth century. The widespread "Country Life

Movement" of the Progressive Era monumentalized the colonial New

England village as an archetype for all of rural America to emulate.

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, the poet and promoter of rural improvement,

suggested in one of his widely-circulated Proclamations that the

United States become a new "New England of ninety million souls." By

the early twentieth century the ubiquitous New England village was a

popular subject for art', literature and advertising, and had become a

stereotype in the American mind. It was a treasured image so familiar

to people everywhere, that Thornton Wilder did not use a scenic

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backdrop, but just a few evocative lines, to re-create Grover's

Corner, New Hampshire, in Our Town.*^ Even the possessive pronoun

in the title further suggested that the landscape was distinctively

American and symbolic.

Certain New England villages figured more prominently than

others as archetypes during the Colonial Revival. Writers continually

praised Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for having the first Village

Improvement Society in America. Places such as Old Lyme, Connecticut,

and Cornish, New Hampshire, were noted as exclusive artists' colonies.

Deerfield, Massachusetts, gained admiration for its "untouched" charm.

Wallace Nutting, like many writers and travelers, favored the hill

country of northwestern Connecticut. Nutting boldly proclaimed in

Connecticut Beautiful that this state was

a museum of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century American life. Her numerous historical societies have done far more than Massachusetts, or indeed, than any other state in keeping for us the examples and records of what is very old .... Connecticut landscapes are more definitely defined as early American scenes than any other part of our 1and.* *

Litchfield, Connecticut, was one of the most admired New

England villages during the Colonial Revival. Local tradition records

that Sinclair Lewis once said that the "only street in America more

beautiful than North Street in Litchfield was South Street in

12 Litchfield." Photographs of this village accompanied numerous

national advertisements for everything from white paint to old-

fashioned candy. During the last nineteenth and early twentieth

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centuries, American architectural history books, academic journals,

and popular periodicals featured articles and measured drawings of

the town's colonial architecture. Litchfield furthermore attracted

worldwide recognition in 1913 as the first town in America to remodel

its historic landscape comprehensively in the colonial style.

The legacy of a landscape like Litchfield's persists into

modern times. The "typical" New England village still answers to the

aspirations and normative values of Americans. In the prologue to

their McCarthy-era book Frontier of Freedom: The Soul and Substance

of America Portrayed in One Extraordinary Village, Old Deerfield,

Massachusetts, Samuel Chamberlain and Henry N. Flynt saw the New

England village as an answer to Communist anti-American propaganda:

there is a legion of . . . replies to the vilification of the Communists, and they do not need to be couched in calumny or hollow phrases. They can even be ex pressed pleasantly. Visual truth speaks louder than words in contradicting propaganda. A graphic picture of one of a hundred phrases of American life--a state university, a western farm, a New England village-- can be the most eloquent response to the strident falsehoods poisoning the air today. We have chosen the symbol of a specific village street. Among many others, it demonstrates the calm strength of American today.

Chamberlain demonstrated the strength of the New England village and

perpetuated its image in popular culture by publishing between 1930

and 1975 several photo-essay books, post card series, and calendars

featuring his favorite towns. Litchfield appears to have been the

epitome of the stereotype, Chamberlain ennobling its Congregational

Church on the cover of his 1962 book, The New England Image.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter 2

FROM PIONEER WILDERNESS TO POLITE WORLD:

THE COLONIAL LANDSCAPE OF LITCHFIELD

During the Colonial Revival most of the inhabitants of

Litchfield believed that they were living in a unique city upon a

hill that accurately re-created the look of colonial times. Wooden

houses painted white with dark-colored blinds, towering elm trees

arching over streets, a well-manicured village green, and a classical

Congregational church were the most important elements of this

idyllic setting. The homogeneity of the landscape and the pristine

quality of the architecture suggested perfect eighteenth-century

order. The conventional historical interpretation of Litchfield's

settlement relied on the a priori assumption that its first

inhabitants had cleared a "pioneer wilderness" and bravely established

a nucleated village around a meetinghouse. The community remained

church-oriented and compact throughout the eighteenth century.

Until the Revolution, most families lived in crude log cabins. After

the war, a newly rich mercantile class built fashionable homes in

Litchfield, and the town became part of the sophisticated "polite

world." Litchfield deliquesced into an isolated but dignified

backwater in the nineteenth century, only to be restored to its

"colonial" grandeur during the early part of the present century.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 12

It is true that Litchfield's comprehensive restoration did

not convince everyone. An early skeptic once remarked: "The village

looked more colonial in 1930 than it ever did in the colonial era."^

But this response was exceptional; few people had doubts about the

appearance of Litchfield's contrived landscape during the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The town's first history,

printed in 1845, relied almost exclusively on tradition and one man's

memory of the past, rather than on documented facts. Subsequent

histories, down to this day, expand upon and perpetuate Litchfield's

mythology. In order to understand the misconceptions and idealiza

tions embodied in the Colonial Revival landscape we must begin with

an unromanticized documentation and interpretation of colonial

Litchfield.

Third-generation New Englanders established Litchfield in

1719 as part of the late frontier settlement of northwestern

Connecticut. This wilderness community in the foothills of the

Berkshire Mountains was thirty miles west of Hartford, and 102 miles

northwest of New York City. The original town measured ten miles

square; its nucleus contained a mile-long plateau of large farm

lots. Litchfield was a speculative or proprietary settlement, and

about half of its original investors, or approximately thirty heads

of households, actually lived in the town. Only about ten families

permanently settled within the nucleus; the rest lived on dispersed

farms.

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During the first generation of settlement, most families lived

in one- or two-room unpainted plank structures (Figure 2a). A

Congregational meetinghouse in the "plain" style stood on common land

in the center of the village. A few houses and three large garrisons

were the only other structures within the nucleus. By the 1740s,

land records indicate that inhabitants built larger two- and four-room

houses, presumably in the latest style.

In 1751 Litchfield became the shiretown for Litchfield County

and grew in area and population. The first recorded population was

1,366 in 1756. Even though the town was an important administrative

center, a map drawn by Ezra Stiles (Figure 2) in 1762 indicates that

while some 220 families owned farms or mill sites on the outskirts

of town, only about thirty lived within the nucleus, mainly rich

attorneys, physicians, and merchants, a school teacher, clergyman,

and several tavernkeepers. These "professional gentlemen" built

fashionable five-bay houses (Figure 2c) painted shades of red, brown,

green, and blue— if they were painted at all.16 Such houses usually

had rear additions of a kitchen ell, sink room, wood house, and

stable. Interior rather than exterior shutters prevailed. Most

houses did not have front lawns; they abutted unshaded dirt streets.

Pig pens, poultry yards, vegetable gardens, an outhouse, and several

barns were close to the main house.

"Sabba-day" or "nooning houses," (Figure 2d), common in the

eighteenth century, were extinct by the early nineteenth. These

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Litchfield iXJCAfJr B.

*•44^' to

a *

#/LtyUA,L(h

jpl */(iA *4fiAV*>-

Figure 2. Ezra Stiles, Map of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1762, with later insets:

2a. House-type built from 1719-1760

2b. Mary Ann Lewis's sketch of the Congregational Meetinghouse

2c. House-type built from 1740-1810

2d. Sabba-day house.

(The Litchfield Historical Society)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. buildings were small one- or two-room impermanent structures that

farmers who lived on the outskirts of town used for warmth and

noonday meals between religious services on the Sabbath. They also

functioned as town houses when a farmer conducted extended business

in the village center. The town allowed farmers to build Sabba-day

houses on common land, the most popular place being the middle of

a street.

When Ezra Stiles drew his map the second Congregational

Meetinghouse was an unpainted structure less than a year old. It

was not "coloured" until ten years later. In all likelihood, the

original color was a stone red, as microscopic analysis of Ralph

Earl portraits reveal that although the steeple of the meetinghouse

was white, the rest of the structure was red. A sketch by Mary Anne

Lewis also shows that this meetinghouse was painted red as late as 17 1817 (Figure 2b). A classic white Congregational church did not

appear in Litchfield until the 1820s or perhaps with the third

church structure of 1829.

The meetinghouse, courthouse, jail, tavern, and schoolhouse

stood in the middle of Litchfield's main intersection. There was no

park-like green with ornamental rows of trees in the town's village

center during the colonial period. Writers referred to this location

as an open "area," "square" or "space," containing market stalls,

hitching posts, and animal pens in addition to garbage and wood piles.

Until the Revolutionary War, there were no more than fifty buildings

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within Litchfield's nucleus. The town essentially was a milling and

1R agricultural settlement.

During the Revolution, however, Litchfield became a strategic

crossroads for travelers en route to Boston, Hartford, Albany, or

New York. Craftsmen, merchants, and innkeepers began building up

the village center. The town played a renowned role in our nation's

struggle for freedom. Governor Oliver Wolcott, signer of the

Declaration of Independence and brigadier general of the Connecticut

militia, came from an old Litchfield family. Ethan Allan was a

native son. Folklore has it that the famous Regiment of Horse--led

by Colonel Elisha Sheldon of Litchfield— was George Washington's

favorite corps. Washington also visited Litchfield on several

occasions. The town served as an important outpost for supply storage

and maintained a secret prison for British spies. The most famous

event occurred when the Sons of Liberty tore down the lead equestrian

statue of King George III from its pedestal on the Bowling Green in

New York City and then secretly shipped it to Litchfield, where it

was melted down for bullets. Such people and events, of course, were

glorified during the Colonial Revival.

After the war Litchfield enjoyed a "Golden Age of Prosperity"

as a commercial and industrial urban village. The town was noted

as a center for progressive education. In 1784 Judge Tapping Reeve

founded the first private law school in America, training future

vice presidents, senators, congressmen and, among others, John C.

Calhoun, John M. Clayton, Horace Mann, Noah Webstar, and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17

Samuel F. B. Morse. Sarah Pierce started the first female academy

in America, attracting a distinguished group of young ladies from

all over the United States. Miss Pierce's school pioneered education

as well as equal rights for women. The reputation of these academic

institutions combined with a growing merchantile economy fostered

new prosperity in Litchfield.

The stark urban appearance of northwestern Connecticut's

hill villages impressed travelers during the colonial period. Sensi

tive observers particularly admired the stylishness of Litchfield's

federal architecture. William Martin, a well-traveled Southerner,

remarked that Litchfield was "one of the most beautiful towns in the

world with houses that were large and elegant, neatly arranged and

all painted." Several writers commented on the "impressive size and

very elegant fashion of the meetinghouses." Timothy Dwight felt that

the county courthouse was "handsomer than any other in the state."

The contrasting countryside also attracted the attention of numerous

visitors, J. P. Brissot de Warville referring to the region as the

"paradise of the United States." 19 Ralph Earl perhaps best captured

Litchfield's fashionable buildings and lush countryside. Wealthy

families such as the Wolcotts and the Tallmadges proudly commissioned

him to paint their portraits with their new homes, the Congregational

Church, and rolling hills as the background. It was Litchfield's

landscape that inspired Earl to be among the first formally trained

American artists to paint sitters in a local rather than a classical

setting.

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During the Golden Age of New England's hill villages, homes

and shops built close together in a congested nucleus on treeless

wide-open streets were positive signs of modernity and "civilized

advancement." In the late 1780s when Oliver Wolcott, Jr. planted

thirteen sycamore trees in honor of the thirteen original colonies,

town elders criticized him for obstructing progress by reforesting

the streets that the town's founding fathers had worked so hard to 20 clear. By colonial standards, treeless streets represented order

and man's dominance over the landscape. In Greenfield Hill (1794)

Timothy Dwight described a "flourishing" village as one where

"industry resounds." Dwight's poem, like Ralph Earl's paintings, was

a fitting tribute to America's distinctive landscape. As Kenneth

Silverman has postulated, Greenfield Hill was the first lengthy poem

in America consciously written for a native audience. 21 Both Dwight

and Earl provided Americans with some of the earliest images that

eventually contributed to the stereotype of the ideal New England

village.

By 1810 Litchfield was the fourth largest settlement in

Connecticut, with a population of 4,639. There were over 400

farmsteads on the outskirts of town, in addition to the mills and

manufactories listed in Table 1. Litchfield's nucleus now contained

over 125 houses, shops, and public buildings. Table 2 enumerates

some of the uses of these structures.

There was no separate business district in Litchfield's

village center during the colonial period. What later became

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TABLE 1

MILLS AND. MANUFACTORIES ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF LITCHFIELD IN 1810

4 forges for iron 18' saw mills 1 slitting mill 5 large tanneries 1 oil mill 5 small tanneries 1 paper mill 2 comb manufactories 1 nail manufactory 2 carding machines for wool 6 fulling mills 1 cotton manufactory 5 grist mills

TABLE 2

SHOPS AND PUBLIC BUILDINGS IN LITCHFIELD CENTER IN 1810

2 hatters shops 2 brick yards 2 carriage makers 1 post office 11 justices of the peace 1 bank 7 attorneys at law 1 newspaper 8 physicians 2 churches 1 surgeon 1 courthouse 11 merchants 3 schools 3 goldsmiths 2 book shops 19 house carpenters and/or joiners 3 blacksmiths 4 cabinet makers 3 potters 3 saddlers 3 clothiers 10 taverns jail

Both Tables are adapted from James Morris, A Statistical Account of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1810.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20

sprawling residential streets during the Colonial Revival were

congested commercial streets throughout the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries. An individual either had a shop or an

office adjacent to his residence. The prosperous merchant Julius 22 Deming lived in a house and store similar to that in Figure 3.

Deming made most of his money in the China trade as well as in

several industrial enterprises that developed after the Revolutionary

War. He commissioned William Sprats to design his house in 1793, one

that reflected the latest, "most elegant" style of architecture.

Accordingly, it was painted white, an uncommon color in Litchfield

during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Deming*s fashion

able house most likely stood out as a significant symbol of social

status and economic wealth.

Recent research on the original colors of eighteenth-century

New England structures shows that white was not a popular color. Only

as part of the later neoclassical or federal aesthetic did light

yellow-ochres, pale pearl grays, and various shades of off-white

become fashionable. Shades of white reached their peak in popularity

between roughly 1810 and 1840, but these shades varied from a stone

gray to a buff brown. The stark white so familiar to us today was, 23 in fact, first produced during the Colonial Revival.

Litchfield reached the peak of its Golden Age during the 1820s

when tradesmen, merchants, and professional gentlemen served a popula

tion of more than 4,600. Enrollment in both the Tapping Reeve Law

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Figure 3. The Elijah Boardman House (Built in New Milford, Connecticut, 1792) painted by Ralph Earl, 1796. The architect of this house, William Sprats, built the Julius Deming House in Litchfield, Connecticut, a year later. (Cornelia Boardman Aldridge Service.)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22

School and Miss Pierce's Female Academy also reached a record high.

The Reverend Lyman Beecher served the Congregational Church and

directed an overwhelming religious revival. Rebecca Couch, a student

at the Academy, captured the prosperity of Litchfield at this time in

a watercolor (Figure 4), and Benjamin Silliman, on his travels through

New England in 1820, described the town in this way:

Litchfield Hill is a beautiful spot. One principal street extends more than a mile and contains a collection of very handsome houses with gardens and courtyards. The houses and appendages are generally painted white. And it is rare to see so considerable a number of houses in a country town where nearly all apparently belong to gentry . . . it presents a very interesting and gratifying spectacle.

Such a depiction made a lasting impression on Litchfield's residents.

This classical image of the early nineteenth century, rather than the

pre-Revolutionary pioneer appearance of the eighteenth, served as the

archetype to which people looked when they "restored" the town during

the Colonial Revival.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23

,' * » « 3 f * i i . — H j

■' ■- '. ■'«■■ ^-•^apfeWW ‘Tc

Figure 4. Rebecca Couch, View of Litchfield, Connecticut, ca. 1820. (The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center.)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 3

FROM COLONIAL URBAN VILLAGE TO VICTORIAN COUNTRY TOWN

Beginning in the 1830s, Litchfield's political, educational,

and economic structure drastically changed with the closing of the

Tapping Reeve Law School, which yielded to competition from larger,

more metropolitan law schools at Harvard and Yale. Litchfield lost

its reputation as an influential legal center, along with a substantial

amount of related business and trade. As a means of recovery, a few

entrepreneurs built larger mills and manufactories, only to find that

Litchfield's rivers could not supply sufficient water power. Commercial

activity drastically declined when the railroad bypassed the hill-top

village. The population dropped below 4,500 as laborers, craftsmen,

and merchants sought better work in the more industrial cities of 25 Hartford, Waterbury, Danbury, New Haven, and Bridgeport.

Agriculture also decreased substantially during the 1830s and

forties as families abandoned their farms in Connecticut and moved to

more competitive farming regions in the West. Such moves were

familiar to Litchfield's agricultural population because Connecticut

farmers moved to Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan, taking their Connecticut

culture with them. Each of these states has a town named after

Litchfield. Settlements in Ohio often copied the plan and classical

architecture of their native New England counterparts. Litchfield's

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Congregational Church, for example, inspired the Congregational Church

in Tallmadge, Ohio, a tribute more than appropriate because the

church's first minister was from Litchfield, Connecticut. Indeed, the

town itself was named for Benjamin Tallmadge of Litchfield, a major

land speculator on the Western Reserve. Such transmission of style

was an important contribution to the West's stereotypical image of

the New England village.

Even though Litchfield experienced a rapid depopulation and

deindustrialization in the 1830s, it did not become a decadent

backwater. Many of the wealthy "professional gentlemen" retired and

continued to live in Litchfield as part of the landed aristocracy.

A few lawyers and doctors moved to New York for career advancement

but maintained their ancestral homes in Litchfield as country summer

residences. The high price of real estate came down, and other

well-to-do New Yorkers quietly began buying or building second homes

in Litchfield. Year-round inhabitants welcomed these summerfolk

because they came from social, cultural, and economic backgrounds

similar to those of the Litchfield native and were, like them,

descendants of old American families. Summer residents also brought

increased revenue for the townspeople and a new desire to create a

more pastoral village. Along with the support of permanent Litchfield

residents, summer residents planted trees and created a central park

in 1835. Beautification efforts continued for another ten years, and

the once-barren colonial village became a carefully landscaped

Victorian resort. Residents planted irregular, overgrown greenery

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after Andrew Jackson Downing's "picturesque" fashion. Colonial

picket fences were torn down so that the entire village would

resemble a rambling park. Residents demolished most of the

eighteenth-century shops, offices, and outbuildings, and built

asymmetrical, polychromed cottages in their place. Owners of

colonial homes updated their houses with earth-tone color schemes

and bracketed architectural details. Litchfield kept pace with the

times, enjoying the transition from a commercial urban village to a

residential country town.

By the mid nineteenth century several other towns in the

Berkshires were summer retreats for old-money New Yorkers and

Bostonians, influential figures who formed Village Improvement

Societies that planned landscape beautification more carefully.

The Reverend Horace Bushnell, the Reverend B. G. Northrop (both of

whom were born and raised in Litchfield County), and A. J. Downing

promoted rural and village improvement nationwide. They suggested

planting trees, ivy, and shrubbery that would grow to please the

present generation and--more importantly--those of the future. This

type of beautification did not evoke a sense of the past. Instead,

as Downing stated, such improvements were a "powerful means of

9 A civilization . . . and progress." "Improvement," in this particular

mid nineteenth-century context, meant modernization. Picturesque

landscaping updated the old-fashioned bare streets. "Beautification

is a town's prosperity” was a popular slogan for Village Improvement

Societies, and "prosperity" meant modern advancement.

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Progress and prosperity, in a sense, preoccupied the minds

of most individuals in nineteenth-century America. We regarded

ourselves as an abundant, superior, and unique nation; only in the

United States, the land of opportunity, could the bucolic country

town so successfully co-exist with the industrial city. But not all

Americans shared positive feelings about progress in the mid nineteenth

century. There were some antimodernists who were skeptical of our

nation's rapid industrial and urban expansion. The Congregational

theologian Horace Bushnell consequently advocated a stronger religious

understanding of progress, modernization, and village improvement. In

his nationally circulated essay The Age of Homespun (1851) Bushnell

described Litchfield County's smooth transition from a primitive

wilderness to a civilized culture, elevated through the advancement

of industry, commerce, government, and education. He admonished 27 disbelievers to have faith in God and His influence over the future.

Skepticism from all levels of society increased nonetheless as the

next generation faced dramatic social changes in industrial cities

and as our nation became politically and culturally divided in the

Civil War.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 4

CREATING THE IDEAL COLONIAL IMAGE

During the postwar Centennial celebration and subsequent

Colonial Revival, America's new interest in the past prompted Village

Improvement Societies to beautify towns in a different style. As

cities and industry expanded uncontrollably, antimodernism intensified,

these societies began to historicize the landscape in what they

thought was a proper colonial fashion.

In Litchfield people looked back not to the Age of Homespun

as a colonial source, but to the Golden Age of Prosperity, the period

of the stylish white house that expressed order, balance, rationality,

and security. Residents did not rely on documentary evidence for

their colonial restorations, but based their work instead on traditions

and memory, romanticizing, sentimentalizing, and idealizing the image

of the colonial style, copying only the most elite features. Eager

residents wanted what they perceived as an accurately reproduced

colonial house, but they did not want the outbuildings, stables,

shops, animal pens, and vegetable gardens that had originally gone

along with such a house. The residents of Litchfield wanted the look

of the flourishing federal village minus the signs of the period's

commercialism and industrialism. They wanted to create what they

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deemed a more refined and dignified colonial setting. Home owners

preferred flower to vegetable gardens, white to red houses. Elm-

shaded streets were based on sparse historic references to sporadic

tree plantings.

The Litchfielders, like so many of the Colonial Revivalists

that were to follow their example, worked less to achieve strict

historical accuracy than to create a generalized colonial conceit.

In a recent article on R. T. H. Halsey as curator of the original

American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wendy Kaplan

observed that "idealization of the past [was] a reaction to fears of

foreign contamination, industrialization, and irrevocable change in

American life." She cites anthropologist Ralph Linton's "observation

that such idealization leads to ancestor worship, wherby 'the society's

members feel that by behaving as the ancestors did they will, in some

usually undefined way, help to recreate the total situation in which

the ancestors lived.'" Having lost a national sense of innocence

after a shattering civil war, faced with a bewildering influx of

immigrants, and surveying the disintegration of American agrarianism,

the Litchfielders sought asylum in the idealized New England village,

commencing its elevation to the status of national symbol.

Litchfield was at the forefront of a new phase of Village

Improvement. The town's first "colonialization" project preserved

and labeled the remains of Oliver Wolcott, Jr.'s thirteen sycamore

trees. For the Centennial, the Society replaced the randomly planted

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mixture of trees along the town's streets with regimented rows of

American elms, choosing this type of tree for its distinctive native

branching pattern. In addition, the planners knew that the elm grows

very quickly in Litchfield's climate so that it would take only about

fifteen years for the trees to arch over the village streets, creating

a homogeneous "colonial" appearance. Such tree formations also

suggested an important spiritual security, people readily associating 29 overarching branches with the all-embracing arms of God.

Most of the funding for Litchfield's beautification projects

came from private sources. The town legislature, however, provided

the manual labor. It required all locally jailed prisoners to water

and mow both public and private lawns. The townspeople believed that

this was one of the best ways to rehabilitate criminals and turn them

into patriotic, law-abiding, and conscientious citizens.

In the early 1880s Litchfield's Village Improvement Society

initiated an important architectural project. Prior to this time the

townspeople had taken pride in their colonial homes but had directed

more attention to the historic events and people associated with

houses rather than to the age and architecture of the building them

selves. Their interest shifted to the physical structures during the

Colonial Revival. Litchfield was most likely the first town in

America to sponsor a campaign to date and placard its historic houses.

Litchfield's colonial homes, in a sense, needed designation because

about 65% of the town's houses were in the competing gothic style.

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A building marked with a colonial date, then, acquired a special

significance and function. As one writer observed, "the passerby

would gain a sense of history, security, patriotism and stability

when he encountered a doorway bearing an eighteenth-century date."

Litchfield's secluded rural setting helped to determine the

persistence of a strictly colonial American style. Residents in the

town did not build what Henry James called "white elephants, with

their affront to proportion and discretion," homes indigenous to

seaside summer resorts such as Newport and generally not found along

restrained village streets. In A Backward Glance Edith Wharton

remarked on how extravagant summer residences ruined the colonial

character of Newport. Wharton even described her joyous "escape"

from an ugly Tudor house in Newport, "a vapid watering-place," to a

Colonial Revival home in the Berkshire Mountains, "the real country.

Litchfield also did not attract any of the ostentatious

"nouveaux riches," as Newport did. Litchfielders often referred to 32 the Newport "400" as "un-American hybrids." In.contrast, Litchfield

appealed to old-money families with impeccable ancestral attachment to

the town. Most year-round residents lived in colonial houses or on

land owned by their forebears. Many summer residents were either

descended from old Litchfield stock or from ancestors who once

attended school there. A Miss Perkins, a great granddaughter of the

merchant Julius Deming, is typical of Litchfield's residents. She

posed for a photograph (Figure 5) wearing an approximation of a

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Figure 5. Miss Perkins, ca. 1890 (Mrs. Ludlow S. Bull.)

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colonial dress and a locket miniature of her grandfather as she pours

tea from his armorial set of Chinese export porcelain. Miss Perkins

was just one of thousands of "aboriginal aristocrats" in Litchfield,

influentials who initiated a comprehensive restoration of the town

in the colonial or "ancestral" style that was in full force by the

mid 1880s. The security— but, more importantly, the social and

cultural status--of living in a colonial home became a self-conscious

concern for Litchfield's elite. These townspeople went to great

lengths to create what they perceived and idealized as the colonial

style of architecture. '

The most common way of achieving a colonial look was to

perpetuate the tradition of the white house with black or dark green

shutters. The John Collins house (Figure 6), for example, was built

in 1782 and was first painted red; it was not painted white until

1815, during the height of Litchfield's Golden Age. Exterior shutters

most likely were added at this time, too, the building originally

having had interior shutters. This house remained white throughout

the rest of the nineteenth century. During the Colonial Revival no

one doubted that the house had always been white. The owners relied

on tradition, believing that they were restoring the "correct"

colonial appearance of the house by painting it white.

A second way that a home owner could create the colonial look

was to take an eighteenth-century structure such as the Julius Deming

house (Figure 7) and make it an even grander statement of the colonial

style (Figure 8). The architect E. K. Rossiter duplicated the

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Figure 6. The John Collins house, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1782. (Nan F. Heminway.)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35

Figure 7. William Sprats, facade and south elevation, The Julius Deming house, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1793. Photo graphed in 1875 before alterations. (Mrs. Ludlow S. Bull.)

Figure 8. The Julius Deming house, south elevation after 1888 alterations by Rossiter and Wright. (Mrs. Ludlow S, Bull.)

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original Palladian facade on a new and larger projecting portico on

the south elevation. He added colonial dormer windows to a raised

roof and romantic bay windows to the ground floor of the south

elevation. Enlarged chimney-stacks displayed the dates 1793 and

1888, commemorating both the original construction and the later

colonialization.

The coveted colonial style could also be achieved in several

other ways. During the late nineteenth century, it was common to take

a polychrome Victorian house and render it "colonial" by painting it

white (Figure 9). Even though this type of house had no character

istically colonial architectural elements, it could at least match

Litchfield's classic color scheme. This structure underwent a more

dramatic change during the 1920s when the owner totally transformed

it into a gambrel roof colonial-style structure (Figure 10). Many

Victorian homes were subjected to such a character change. In order

to create a more authentic colonial appearance, architects made exact

copies of details from genuine colonial structures or period design

books. Several houses in Litchfield had meticulous reproductions of

moldings, doorways, and columns from Asher Benjamin source books. The

Colonial Revival architect and critic Aymar Embury II often found it

difficult to distinguish between colonial and Colonial Revival details.

Any type of house could be colonialized during the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. Academic and popular journals, as well as

advice books, offered helpful hints for turning even the "smallest

7 7 eyesore of a structure into a colonial jewel."

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Figure 9. The Lamb house, Litchfield, Connecticut, photographed ca. 1905, before alterations. (The Litchfield Historical Society.)

Figure 10. The Lamb house, Litchfield, Connecticut, after 1920s colonialization. (The Litchfield Historical Society.)

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A final way of achieving the colonial look was to commission

a New York architect to design a "modern Colonial" home. This came

in two distinct styles. The first copied local architecture from

Litchfield's Golden Age. On the Mary Perkins Quincy house (Figure 11)

the architects Howells and Stokes combined the overall Georgian form

of the 1775 Benjamin Tallmadge house with the Palladian window and

doorway of the Julius Deming house. The Quincy house was painted a

pale yellow and had olive green shutters. Complete with a white

picket fence, it stood in perfect harmony with the surrounding colonial

houses.

The second "modern Colonial" style was a bit more romantic:

it evoked a familiar and erroneous stereotype of the Southern

plantation (Figure 12). Even though this style had never been a part

of Litchfield's colonial building tradition, it was nonetheless a

tasteful architectural interpretation. The use of this style in

Litchfield was appropriate because it, too, suggested a significant

Golden Age, the very reverse of post Civil War Northern supremacy:

the age of the antebellum South and white supremacy. As one resident

of Litchfield remarked in a discussion of the potential immigrant

threat in the United Stated, "with a rise in white supremacy comes the 34 rise of white pillars."

By the turn of the century, Litchfield's colonial and

colonial-looking homes, situated behind green sloping lawns and

nestled under canopies of elms, rendered a peaceful, homogeneous

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 11. (below) Howells and Stokes, the Mary Perkins Quincy house, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1892. (above) The Benjamin Tallmadge house, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1775. (The Litchfield Historical Society.)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 40

Mi"1 * iV *

Figure 12. Samuel Edson Gage, The Underwood house, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1898 in the "Southern Colonial" style. (The Litchfield Historical Society.)

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appearance. Litchfield was noted throughout the United States as a

white city upon a hill. The townspeople took great pride in their

village. An active Daughters of the American Revolution sponsored

historical exhibits in concert with the town's historical society.

The Village Improvement Society offered several lecture series on

American architecture in conjunction with their beautification

projects. Individuals tried to approximate the lifestyle of their

ancestors by holding colonial teas, costume balls, musicales, and

historical pageants. Mrs. Shepherd Knapp donated her large colonial

farm to the Fresh Air Fund so that poor New York City children could

come to the country for a "breath of our great democracy" and be

• 7 r "moulded into upright and honored citizens." Newspaper accounts of

the period praised the congenial rapport between the city summer folk

and the year-round residents. Merchants gladly catered to the needs

of the upper classes. Litchfield had a harmless immigrant population

of Irish who were mainly servants and caretakers for the wealthy.

The townspeople did not feel threatened by the Irish because they were

small in number, knew their place in society, and were honest Roman

Catholics. In addition, their fair features did not make them look

too foreign, and they shared at least a similar language.

The residents of Litchfield delighted in showing off their

ideal town while making it virtually inaccessible to the common folk.

The wealthy elites forbade both the railroad and the trolley from

coming through, primarily to discourage tourism. They did not want

any of what they called "unworthies" spoiling their "utopia." This

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. act also represented a conscious rejection of a modem intrusion that

would lead to commercialism and industrialism. A trolley was for the

evil city, not the virtuous country. Merchants in other towns

objected to being cut off from wealthy customers living in Litchfield.

For more than a decade Litchfield publicly fought surrounding towns

for its privacy. In an argument printed in a local paper one merchant

from nearby Torrington accused Litchfielders of being too proud to

associate with commoners and speculated that they spent all of their

time tracing their ancestry. Such accusations only pleased the

inhabitants of Litchfield, who were not ashamed of their insular

prejudices. Litchfielders honestly believed that they were serving

their country by preserving and isolating their unique village. It

was in all seriousness and with a due sense of patriotism that one

of the town's leading citizens proposed sending a model of Litchfield

to the St. Louis exposition as an example of the ideal New England

3 6 town, the defender of democracy.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 5

THE SHAPING OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT

In 1923 Thorstein Veblen observed that "the country town is one

of the great American Institutions; perhaps the greatest in the sense

that it has had and continues to have a greater part than any other in 37 shaping public sentiment and giving character to American culture."

Veblen might not have made such a powerful statement had Americans not

so self-consciously shaped the character of their idyllic country

towns during the preceding years of the Colonial Revival. The early

twentieth century witnessed our nation's most concerted efforts to

preserve its country town. In 1908, as a direct response to the

adverse effects of industrialization and to the concomitant desertion

of farms throughout the United States, Theodore Roosevelt initiated

the Country Life Movement, which more seriously re-evaluated social,

economic, and cultural conditions in rural America. In addition, this

movement helped to establish our nation's first state forests and

parks as well as to preserve our natural resources. New England's

colonialized villages and restored farms served as inspirational

models for rural towns all over America.

Rural Manhood and The Village Magazine, primarily published

for Western farmers, carefully detailed the improvements of New

England's towns and farming regions. Articles in such periodicals

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made a universal impression on the landscape. In Main Street

Sinclair Lewis said of Mankato, Minnesota, that it is "not a prairie

town, but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white

and green New England reborn." The future stability of farms and

villages in the West depended on the ideal appearance and survival of

the New England archetype. As Lewis Mumford assured society:

In what other part of the world has such a harmonious balance between the natural and the social environment been preserved? . . . the New England village reaches a pretty fair pitch of worldly perfection; and beneath all the superficial changes that affected it in the next century and a half a reference to the dramatic changes of the nineteenth century its sturdy framework held together remarkably well.38

Beginning in 1913 Litchfield played its most important role

as a national archetype and symbol. In this year the Village Improve

ment Society, directed by Ludlow S. Bull and Charles T. Payne,

proposed a town-wide project to remodel in the "purely" colonial

style all of Litchfield's public and commercial buildings as well as

the village green. With the completion of this project, Litchfield

would become America's first comprehensive restoration of our

colonial past. Newspapers nationwide praised the town by reporting

that

while practically every boro, village, and town in the United States is seeking twentieth-century improvements and zealously working for a position in the march of progress, Litchfield thru the choice of its people, after standing aloof and looking on, is about to turn the other way.

That Litchfield proposed such colonialization plans in 1913

is no accident of history. The townspeople's deliberate rejection of

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modem design coincided with the opening of the Armory Show in New

York and America's official introduction to "modern art." Many of

Litchfield's summer e'lite disliked the show but had to be careful in

what they said about it because many of their social and cultural

peers accepted the new styles. A candid interview with two of

Litchfield's oldest and most prominent residents revealed that many

townspeople disliked the foreign style of the show because it

competed with the native American colonial style. Some residents,

furthermore, resented the prominent Jewish families who patronized

this art, a prejudice that only strengthened Litchfield's colonial

crusade.^

Depictions of villages and village life, ironically, were in

fact exhibited at the Armory Show. American artists such as Anne

GoldthwaiLe, Childe Hassam, and Maurice Prendergast featured abstract

works depicting New England genre scenes. The French artist Maurice

de Vlaminck exhibited the most abstract painting in this vein, a

scene entitled "Village," depicting Rueil, France. In this composition

the artist reduced white houses, black shutters, green trees, and a

village church to mere patches of color.

Litchfield was not interested in such abstraction. The Village

Improvement Society commissioned architects A. P. F. Adenaw, of LaFarge

and Morris, and F. B. J. Renshaw to design all of the colonialization

plans, which were first exhibited in private apartments and clubs in

New York City and then in Litchfield for public approval. A lecture

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. series on colonial American architecture accompanied each exhibition.

The Village Improvement Society personified antimodernist sentiments;

the Society wanted to camouflage all signs of industry and commerce,

leaving not "the slightest vestige of modern design.It is not

surprising, then, that their first project involved transforming the

railroad depot and a series of Victorian storefronts into domestic-

looking colonial structures. The Society had white wooden cornices,

pediments, doorways, quoins, and pillasters custom made and then

attached to the buildings. In some cases, wooden clapboards were

placed completely over the brick exterior of a structure. The Society

similarly changed the court house (Figure 13), thought to be in the

style of "utilitarian ugliness," to a more colonial-looking icon of

justice and democracy.

One of the most important symbols in Litchfield, the village

green, also underwent a total transformation at this time. The

Village Improvement Society hired John Charles Olmstead and Frederick

Law Olmstead, Jr. to relandscape this chaotic plot of land. The

green had been graded and planted several times during the last half

of the nineteenth century but had never had a complete overhaul.

Even though there was no grassy green in eighteenth- or early

nineteenth-century Litchfield, the Olmstead brothers "restored" one

based on an idealized composite of several non-colonial New England

greens. Their product, a symmetrical, tree shaded park, harmonized

with the town down to the smallest details: lampposts and benches

even copied colonial designs. Litchfielders justified the existence

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jK A p * u * i.

* -V g #

Figure 13. (left) Litchfield County Courthouse, 1888. (right) Litchfield County Courthouse as it looked after its 1913 colonialization. (The Litchfield Historical Society.)

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of such a green by arguing that if Litchfield had had a village green

in colonial times, it most surely would have resembled the Olmsteads'

work.42

Other important persons contributed to colonializing and

preserving Litchfield's landscape in 1913. A group of ambitious

ladies formed the town's first Garden Club of America chapter, with

membership limited only to those women already in the D. A. R. With

true patriotic zeal they promoted new colonial-style gardens. They

idealized the past and planted old-fashioned, English flower gardens

rather than the more authentic herb and vegetable gardens. As a

direct result of Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission, Alain C.

White established a 4,000-acre conservation reservation in Litchfield.

In 1913 this was one of the country's largest privately supported

public trusts. White contributed more land over the next few decades,

buying abandoned farms, scenic lookouts, waterfalls, and mountains.

What eventually totalled well over 6,000 acres of prime land formed

the basis of Connecticut's parks and forest system. The residents of

Litchfield enjoyed the security of knowing that their lush countryside

would never be destroyed.

1913 was a landmark year for village improvement generally.

P. T. Farwell published in that year a comprehensive book on the

movement, citing the New England town as the model American community.

Farwell perpetuated the myth of the nucleated tree-shaded village,

identifying environmental protection and town beautification with the

colonial way. He reminded readers that

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identifying environmental protection and town beautification with the

colonial way. He reminded readers that

it is worth remembering that the old Puritan settlers must have had some deep sense of the value of natural beauty, else they would not have surrounded these commons and planted them, here and there, with the graceful elms, now in their majestic old age .... The old Puritans were not without their appreciation of beauty, and oftentimes in town-planning they showed more forethought then has been accredited to them, and more than the builders of the newer towns have usually exercised.^3

Also in 1913 many cities instituted beautification projects based on

the New England village archetype. Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr.

chaired the National Conference on City Planning, campaigning for

better landscaped cities, new building codes, and improved sanitary

conditions. These plans were interrupted, however, by our nation's

entrance into its first world war and an even more intense period of

nativism and insecurity.

Although Litchfield's architectural colonialization abated

during World War I, the town still served as an important symbol of

Americanism. Many New York City families, not necessarily previous

summer residents, moved to this isolated village for a sense of

security and protection. Rather than spend money on cosmetic colonial

remodelings, these people instead founded small hospitals for wounded

soldiers, prepared bandages, and packaged supplies just as their

Revolutionary ancestors had done.

After the war Litchfield's Village Improvement Society

undertook its final and most arduous project, the restoration of the

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Congregational Church, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., a New York architect

and nearby summer resident, supervised this six-year "restoration,"

which may be more accurately termed a reconstruction. The first step

was particularly drastic. The parishoners demolished the existing

Gothic Revival church built in 1873, rejecting Victorian taste in

favor of the colonial style.^4 The next step required salvaging what

was left of the 1829 Congregational Church, which by the 1920s was

gutted, having been used variously as a cow barn, warehouse, movie

theater, and gymnasium. The sparse remains of this structure were

moved to a site overlooking the village green. Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,

totally redesigned the interior, basing it on early nineteenth-century

architectural design books. Everything but a new mahogany pulpit was

painted white. Dana reconstructed a steeple and other exterior

ornaments, and by 1929 the church had assumed the classical appearance

we still see today (Figure 1). With the completion of this icon and

the romantic restoration of the Tapping Reeve Law School during the

following year, the residents of Litchfield had created their ideal

image of a "colonial" New England town for Americans to admire and

adopt. For a nation experiencing the uncertainties and hardships of

the Great Depression, Litchfield's landscape served as an even greater

symbol of survival, stability, and democracy.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CONCLUSION

THE SURVIVAL OF THE REVIVAL

Other New England towns, particularly rural summer resorts,

underwent similar transformations during the Colonial Revival, but

Litchfield was at the forefront of the colonialization process. The

town furthermore served as a source of inspiration for establishing

the later museum villages of Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge

Village, and Historic Deerfield.^ The visual plan of Litchfield,

like the spiritual plan of John Winthrop's Boston, was to create an

ideal city upon a hill. Winthrop's plan, however, was unsuccessful,

and Americans did not fashion an ideal image of a New England town

until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the

Colonial Revival image of the New England town rather than the

historically accurate colonial image that has made a lasting

material mark on the American landscape.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. FOOTNOTES

The term colonial in the context of this study requires an explanation. When I documented and interpreted the colonial landscape of Litchfield I am referring to 1719-1780, or roughly from the town's first English settlement to just before the close of the Revolution. Popular society today loosely uses "colonial" to describe the style and epoch of the eighteenth century, particularly the years surrounding the Revolution. During the Colonial Revival, popular culture thought of the colonial period as starting in 1620, with the landing of the Pilgrims, and ending around 1840, with the beginnings of industrializa tion. Some architectural historians during the Colonial Revival were aware of the inexact use of this word: C. Matlack Price coincidentally raises this issue in "Historic Houses of Litchfield," The White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs 5, no. 3 (June 1919): 13-14. Also in this article (and for the first time in the monograph series), Price discusses the stereotypical image of the New England town, using Litchfield as an example.

^J. B. Jackson, "Several American Landscapes," in Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson, ed. Ervin H. Zube (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), p. 43. For the transformation of the natural landscape of the New England town during the late nine teenth century see J. B. Jackson, American Space: The Centennial Years, 1865-1876 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1972), pp. 87-136; David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society 1815-1915 (Boston: Little, Borwn and Company, 1979), pp. 93-116; Jay Cantor, The Landscape of Change: Views of Rural New England 1790-1865, Catalogue of an exhibition, February 9 to May 16, 1976 (Sturbridge, MA: Old Sturbridge Village). For further reading on the New England town in American ideology see D. W. Meinig, "Symbolic Landscapes: Some Idealizations of American Communities," in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, ed. D. W. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 164-188; Page Smith, As A City Upon A Hill: The Town in American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).

^For an excellent study of the geographic transformation of the New England town from 1630 to 1830 see Joseph S. Wood, "The Origin of the New England Village" (Ph.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 1978). For a general study of Connecticut towns see Bruce C. Daniels, The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635-1790 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979); Anthony N. B. Garvan, Architecture and

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Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951). For the social, political, cultural and demographic changes of the colonial New England town see Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Inc., 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Inc., 1970); Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Eoston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).

^Wood, p. 5.

^David Lowenthal, "The Place of the Past in the American Landscape," in Geographies of the Mind, ed. Martyn Bowden and David Lowenthal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 106-109.

^(Robert S. Peabody), "Georgian Houses of New England," American Architect 2, (October 20, 1877): 338; also quoted in William B. Rhoads, "The Colonial Revival and American Nationalism," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35, no. 4 (December 1976): 242.

^Harold D. Eberlein, The Architecture of Colonial America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1915), p. 1.

^Rhoads, pp. 239-254.

Q Harriet Beecher Stowe idealized the town of Litchfield in her widely acclaimed novel, Poganuc People (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1878). Stowe's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, partially based Norwood: Village Life in New England (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1869) on Litchfield. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century many prominent writers and local town historians wrote short stories and novels about earlier life in New England towns.

■^Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, "Proclamation of the New Time for Farmers and the New New England," Rural Manhood 4, no. 6 (June 4, 1913): 186. For an interpretation of Our Town see D. W. Meinig, "Symbolic Landscapes," in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 174.

•^Wallace Nutting, Connecticut Beautiful (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1923), p. 7.

^Interview with Mrs. Ludlow Bull, Litchfield, June 1980. Sinclair Lewis first said this to Mr. Ludlow Bull in the early 1920s and the statement has been widely quoted since in articles about the town.

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13 Samuel Chamberlain and Henry Flynt, Frontier of Freedom: The Soul and Substance of America Portrayed in One Extraordinary Village, Old Deerfield, Mass. (New York: Hastings House, 1957), p. 1.

■^For a more detailed discussion of the conventional inter pretation of the New England town see Wood, pp. 1-57.

•^Interview with Mr. Harmon Poole, Litchfield, June, 1980.

am indebted to Sara B. Chase, of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and Richard Candee, preserva tion consultant, for sharing their research and knowledge of eighteenth- century paint colors.

•^See, for example, Ralph Earl's painting, Mrs. Benjamin Tallmadge (1790) at the Litchfield Historical Society. The Mary Anne Lewis sketch of the second Congregational meetinghouse was rediscovered at the Litchfield Historical Society in June 1980. Because it shows a red structure, this sketch was rarely used in historical studies of the town. For a landmark study of the prevailing use of colors other than white on colonial meetinghouses see Peter Benes, "Sky Colors and Scattered Clouds: The Decorative and Architectural Painting of New England Meetinghouses, 1738-1834," in New England Meeting House and Church: 1630-1850, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1979), pp. 51-69.

^Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, translated by Howard C. Rice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 1: 81; "A Traveller Observes," Litchfield Monitor (June 29, 1803).

19William D. Martin, travel journal from South Carolina to Connecticut, 1809, typescript on file at the Litchfield Historical Society; Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (1821-22), ed. Barbara Miller Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 2: 257-259; J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 1788, translated by Mara S. Vamos and Durand Echeverria (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 117.

^ Litchfield Monitor (January 3, 1788). There were some decorative landmark trees along Litchfield's streets during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but these were not regimented rows of arching elms; instead, townspeople planted clusters of oak, beech, horsechestnut, and lombardy populars. Such trees, however, often died before attaining substantial height.

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2^-Timothy Dwight, Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts (Greenfield, CT: by the author, 1794), part 2, lines 1-80. Kenneth Silverman analyzes this poem in Timothy Dwight (New York: Twayne Publishing, Inc., 1969), pp. 43-67.

^Figure 3 is actually the Elijah Boardman house built in New Milford, Connecticut, in 1792. In 1793 Julius Deming built a duplicate of this house (Figure 7) in nearby Litchfield. Both Deming and Boardman came from the same mercantile background and class; the similarity between their homes is important for my discussion of the new Federal style of architecture in Litchfield.

^Again, I am indebted to Sara B. Chase and Richard Candee for this information on paint color.

^ B e n j a m i n Silliman, Geology, Mineralogy, Scenery, etc. in the Counties of New Haven and Litchfield (New Haven, 1820), p. 27.

^Clive Day, The Rise of Manufacturing in Connecticut, 1820- 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935); John C. Herbst, "Hill Town— Valley Town: Goshen and Torrington, Connecticut," (M.A. thesis, Syracuse University, 1950).

26A . J. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1850), preface; Downing, "On the Improvement of Country Villages," The Horticulturalist 3, no. 12 (1848): 545-549. See also David Schuyler's excellent review of David Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815-1915 in Winterthur Portfolio 16, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 350-351.

^Horace Bushnell, The Age of Homespun (Hartford: Edwin Hunt Publishing, 1851); also reprinted nationwide during the last half of the nineteenth century in newspapers and collections of Bushnell's speeches and discourses.

^8Wendy Kaplan, "R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts," Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 51.

^9William Solotaroff, Shade Trees in Towns and Cities (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1911); Charles L. Pack, Trees as Good Citizens (Washington, D.C.: The American Tree Association, 1922). During the 1820s when the Reverend Lyman Beecher was stationed in Litchfield, he preached about the spiritual significance of trees, which inspired a small tree planting movement. His children, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, discussed the moral and patriotic value of trees in several of their writings during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

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30Newspaper accounts from the period strongly suggest that Litchfield was the first town to placard houses. In checking with other American towns, I have not yet found an earlier occurrence. For the quotation see "Beautiful Litchfield," Litchfield Enquirer (May 3, 1882).

^Henry James, The American Scene (1907; reprint ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. xx; Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century, Company, Inc., 1934), pp. 107-124. James also praises in The American Scene the simple lifestyle and classic architecture of the inland New England village as one of the most virtuous features of the landscape.

■^"Litchfield Roads," Litchfield Enquirer (August 24, 1899).

•^Aymar Embury II, Introduction to Asher Benjamin . . . (a reprint of five of Benjamin's architecture books) (New York: The Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1917), pp. 1-2; Emily Post, The Personality of a House (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1930), pp. 90-119.

■^For the quotation see Charles T. Payne to Ludlow S. Bull, letter dated September 17, 1923. In the collection of Mrs. Ludlow S. Bull, Litchfield. During the Colonial Revival popular culture associated large classical porticoes supported by colossal columns with Southern plantation-style architecture; this is yet another erroneous stereotype (see Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones (1924; reprint ed., New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955), p. 54. Several residents of Litchfield even organized tours to the South to get ideas for their homes. In a lecture given at the Winterthur Conference on the Colonial Revival in America (1981), Gretchen Schneider of Colonial Williamsburgh discussed the association of the Civil War-era stereotypical Southern belle's costume with the "colonial" style of dress.

35 "Opening of Shepherd Knapp Memorial Home," Litchfield Enquirer (July 6, 1905).

"^"Litchfield Trolley," Litchfield Enquirer (November 12, 1903); "Torrington Objects," Litchfield Enquirer (November 19, 1903); "Litchfield the Only," Litchfield Enquirer (July 24, 1902).

77 Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (1923), quoted in Max Lerner, The Portable Veblen (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 407.

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70 Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920; reprint ed. New York: The New American Library, 1961), pp. 11-12. For Mumford see Sticks and Stones, pp. 28-29.

•^"Litchfield's Transformation Back to Colonial Styles," Waterbury Republican (Waterbury, CT) (March 2, 1913). Similar articles appeared in newspapers both nationally and worldwide.

^Interview in Litchfield, March, 1982. Both individuals wish to remain anonymous. For a scathing article on antisemitism in Litchfield see Willson Whitman, "0 Little Town . . . (Restricted)," The Nation (December 25, 1943): 751-754.

^Village Improvement Society, Colonial Plans for Litchfield Connecticut (Litchfield, privately printed, 1913, p. 1.

^Extemporaneous remarks of John C. Olmstead, 1913 (typescript at the Litchfield Historical Society); Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., to F. Kingsbury Bull, letter dated March 15, 1913, in the collection of Mrs. Ludlow S. Bull, Litchfield.

^Parris Thaxter Farwell, Village Improvement (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1913), p. 143.

^ A s Kenneth L. Ames has contended in courses on Victorian material culture given at the Winterthur Museum, elites in the 1920s rejected Victorian artifacts and architecture because they were products of a time that significantly alteres and, more importantly, threatened their society. Elites favored the colonial style because it suggested to them a more stable and refined era.

^Interview with Mrs. Ludlow S. Bull, November, 1982. Mrs. Bull recalls that the founders of these museum villages made several trips to Litchfield to get ideas for planning their restorations.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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